


Invocation

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Series: Liminal Spaces [2]
Category: Sagas of Sundry, Sagas of Sundry: Dread, Sagas of Sundry: Madness
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, M/M, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 17:31:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12194484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: Sometimes the Storyteller shapes and drives the story forward.Sometimes the story does the telling.





	Invocation

**Author's Note:**

> Give me a [single Instagram picture](https://www.instagram.com/p/BZft2eDg9pg/) and a place to stand, and I can move the world.
> 
> * * *

Pain. Rending, sudden pain.

It feels as though his forearm is being torn open, and the Storyteller cries out in unexpected agony, scrabbling at his sleeve, fumbling at the button at his wrist. He knows what this means, he _knows_ , and he can’t bear to think about the implications. Not after the last horrific battle to free Black Mountain of its curse.

He doesn’t get the button open before his companion extends a claw and shreds the sleeve away from his skin with the delicacy of touch the Storyteller has come to find not so unbelievable as he once did.

It doesn’t matter. The Goatman might as well have ripped his arm off.

The book is open again.

The pages are whirring by almost invisibly fast, except that he can feel them. There’s a rivulet of blood slowly trickling from the book down toward his wrist.

The Storyteller looks at the Goatman with despair. “They can’t come back here. They don’t _need_ to come back here. There’s nothing to be done. The curse is cleansed.”

“Perhaps they return for the fifth.” The Goatman blinks his golden eyes slowly and gazes down the mountain. Neither of them can see anything but trees, but the Storyteller can imagine what the Goatman is envisioning. How could he not? He helped weave the place into being with his words, fixing its physical existence in place, rock by stone by bone.

And when the time came, when destiny determined it, he helped to bring it down.

“I don’t think there’s any ritual even the four of them working together could do to bring him back. I don’t think _anything_ could bring him back.” The Storyteller doesn’t add, _and I don’t know whether they could even work together that well without him_. He doesn’t add, _his blood is on my hands_. Black Mountain is not kind, curse or no curse. It keeps what it takes, much like a lake far to the east and north of here that’s immortalized in song and passed down over the years..

Tanner is only immortalized here, within the memory of the Storyteller and the Goatman, and the four who got away.

The Storyteller often wonders how they explained it to his family.

“If they are not coming back for him, I do not know what would bring them here,” the Goatman says. He’s stroking the Storyteller’s forearm as though he can placate the book into closing again just by touching it. It won’t work; when there’s a story to be told, it’s not done until it’s done.

“It’s not a year since they last visited, so it’s not a memorial.”

“I feel it is something stronger.” The Goatman’s face doesn’t make expressions the way that humans do, but the Storyteller is familiar enough with his companion’s facial tics and movements to recognize worry. He lifts his free hand and strokes the creature’s head, scratching absently between the horns. “The power of words is compelling.”

It’s then that the Storyteller feels the second pain. This one is low down in his abdomen, behind his navel, like a giant fishhook has sunk into him and begun tugging. To his alarm, he can no longer feel the Goatman’s fur under his fingers. And he can see it _through_ his fingers.

“No. _No_!”

Time and reality distort here. And the thing about that is that they fuck with his memories as well. He’s hardly new to spinning his tales, to using words to frame and support the various existences that he observes. But when he’s tied to one narrative, he just... _forgets_ that he was ever anywhere else.

The Storyteller feels the Goatman’s mouth nudge against his arm, and then the story begins to tell _him_.

* * *

This is no mountain. No small town in New Mexico, either. The Storyteller can hear cars and smell must layered over forgotten cleaning products. No clean forest air. Not even the rank but somehow comfortingly familiar reek of coppery blood. He’s in a room that’s miles from the ranger hut or tumbledown house or even the doublewide trailers whose roofs gleamed visible even from the mountain. It seems to be an apartment, in a time and place he’s not yet clear on. It could be any city and a number of eras. The décor suggests a time before the 1980s, where he’s just been sojourning, but he honestly can’t say beyond that.

He’s travelled literally miles and years. Physically miles and years. Metaphorically miles and years. It doesn’t matter. He’s passed through the spaces between _then/there_ and _here/now_ , and he can’t go back.

He can feel that last whiskery brush of a kiss against his arm and looks down. The book is still open, but the pages have stopped frantically flipping.

There’s no indication of why he’s here. It’s just a room. Maybe a living room? Sunlight slants through sheer curtains, illuminating curtains and wallpaper and the ideas of furniture and the like that are not yet solidified. There's a door, of course. There's always a door, or a cave entrance, or a mineshaft. The Storyteller murmurs an armchair into existence and slumps into it. He doesn’t have anyone here yet, any clear notion of what the story is that has called upon him to be told. No outline, no characters, no plan. Not even a title.

Something is speaking in the walls.

“ _Sssstoryteller_...”

The Storyteller stares resolutely at the mirror that keeps flickering into and out of existence on the wall opposite him. He can see himself, and sometimes the Goatman is behind him, and sometimes it’s someone else. A blindfolded man, smiling. Tanner, camera to his face. A woman who could be Sat’s older sister, hanging onto the arm of a man who could be Kayden’s older brother, both of them laughing—not the twisted belly laughs of the skinwalker, but genuine amusement.

When the mirror doesn’t exist, he can _almost_ see what lurks behind it. Or through it. It’s hard to say. If he’s lucky, he won’t have to say it at all. If he’s lucky, he’ll be narrating the story of a newlywed couple moving into this place, having kids, growing up and old together, dying peacefully in their beds.

He cannot fathom having that kind of luck.

“ _Sssstoryteller... be welcome. Be welcome... to Madness_.”

The Storyteller folds his arms, cupping his hand over the book sigil on his arm, as though he can hold in that last warm breath against his skin for comfort and reassurance.

He does not feel welcome.

All he can do now is wait for the door to open.


End file.
